The drive from Austin to East Texas took me nearly five hours. After I made my way through Houston traffic, the world began to quiet. Thick forests of tall pine trees flanked me on both sides of US 190. It was beautiful, desolate in parts, and unlike anything I’d seen in Texas. I drank in the silence. For months I’d been home with my children 24/7. It was 2021 and we were deep into the pandemic. I was on my way to Jasper to report on the digital divide and how it was affecting rural students. I spoke in advance with a dozen teachers, administrators, and parents. The Jasper school superintendent said the situation was dire. He wanted the rest of the state to know students in rural Texas were struggling.
I’d been living in Texas for more than four years, but this was my first time visiting any place east of Houston. I associated East Texas with Bernie, the Richard Linklater black comedy crime film. I knew Jasper only for the brutal 2001 murder of James Byrd Jr. by white supremacists. I knew, too, that COVID-19 vaccination rates in East Texas counties lagged behind the rest of the state.
These days, I mostly write fiction, but I have been a news reporter for nearly 20 years, and I take the work seriously. Over the years, assignments have taken me across the country and around the world, onto fishing boats in Long Island and into the homes of Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I’ve gone hundreds of feet underground into a coal mine in India and walked through the wards of hospitals in Denmark. It has been a great privilege to enter the lives of others, to sit and listen to their stories and then share them with the world. Early on, I was trained by editors at two newspapers of record to report and write with integrity, to ask tough questions while being respectful,
